Dom, you regularly post AI-generated songs here at JPF, and you’ve told us that you write lyrics, play instruments and sing. I have no reason to doubt that, and I’m not questioning it.

But what we actually hear from you here are pure AI-generated performances. So when you say you’ve “done both,” I simply have no way of knowing that from the material you’ve posted. And that’s why I found your comments in this thread about live performance interesting. If your point is that, in a world of AI-generated music, it will become increasingly difficult to know who is actually behind a recording, then I agree that live performance may become more important.

But that applies to all of us who use AI to create recordings - including you, Ben and me. Ben, for example, often uses AI as part of his writing process, and if he likes the result, he takes the song into a studio and has professional musicians record it, while he usually sings the vocals himself. So what exactly is “his” musicianship there? He’s clearly the vocalist and the songwriter/creator in some sense, but the instrumental performance comes from other musicians and the initial musical ideas may have come from AI, at least partially. I don't know.

A live performance only proves that someone can perform. It doesn’t tell us who wrote the song or how the recording was created.